A Philosopher Adrift in the Sea of Time

Jonathan Tannenbaum has just turned 83, a second bar-mitzvah age in the Jewish tradition. He is a fortunate man, emeritus professor of moral and scientific philosophy at the LSE. For no good reason he starts having panic attacks and recurring nightmares that wake him up screaming to his wife's despair.

The dream always ends with him walking down a dark corridor that ends at a sinister door. He consults a psychotherapist and under hypnosis Jonathan opens the door in his dream only to find another corridor leading to doors of a cabinet holding the scrolls of the Torah. He cannot pass this new barrier, and the dreams continue and he is referred to Dr Nathan Adler, who is a qualified master of the Kabbala, the occult mysticism of the ultra-orthodox Jews.

Dr Adler diagnoses that sometime in the past, one of your ancestors was guilty of a crime that had terrible consequences for the Jewish race. The Kabbalist allowed Tannenbaum's dream access to the content of the cabinet behind the curtains and could walk through to any space/time niche in Jewish history.

His weekly adventures adrift in the sea of time takes him through the creation, the Exodus, the fall of Lachish, the fall of the Temple to the Romans, the siege of Masada, the Lisbon massacre of 1506, the taking of Jerusalem by the allies in 1917, and finally Treblinka concentration camp, where he meets up with his grandfather.

Together they save many prisoners from death in the gas-chambers, and his morbid dreams vanish and he is no longer troubled by panic attacks.